The Logical Essence of Well-Bracketed Control Flow


Amin Timany, Armaël Guéneau, and Lars Birkedal: The Logical Essence of Well-Bracketed Control Flow. In POPL 2024, January 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3632862
Journal Paper
Abstract.

A program is said to be well-bracketed if every called function must return before its caller can resume execution. This is often the case. Well-bracketedness has been captured semantically as a condition on strategies in fully abstract games models and multiple prior works have studied well-bracketedness by showing correctness/security properties of programs where such properties depend on the well-bracketed nature of control flow. The latter category of prior works have all used involved relational models with explicit state-transition systems capturing the relevant parts of the control flow of the program. In this paper we present the first Hoare-style program logic based on separation logic for reasoning about well-bracketedness and use it to show correctness of well-bracketed programs both directly and also through defining unary and binary logical relations models based on this program logic. All results presented in this paper are formalized on top of the Iris framework and mechanized in the Coq proof assistant.

The bibtex source for this publication:
@article{DBLP:journals/pacmpl/TimanyGB24,
 author = {Amin Timany and
 Arma{\"{e}}l Gu{\'{e}}neau and
 Lars Birkedal}, title = {The Logical Essence of Well-Bracketed Control Flow},
 journal = {Proc. {ACM} Program. Lang.},
 volume = {8},
 number = {{POPL}},
 pages = {575--603},
 year = {2024},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3632862},
 doi = {10.1145/3632862},
 timestamp = {Mon, 05 Feb 2024 20:23:02 +0100},
 biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/journals/pacmpl/TimanyGB24.bib},
 bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}